Just before noon, Jeremy Hunt rose in the House of Commons to complain about the mobile phone signal in Godalming. It took an effort of will to remember that a year ago he was delivering the Budget, steering the economic ship and holding the welfare of millions in his hands. He seems a lot more comfortable in his current role as a Surrey consumer champion. In a couple of years his time steering the economy of a G7 country will have completely gone from our minds, as we sit in pub quizzes trying the remember the names of the four chancellors of 2022.
With Rachel Reeves giving her Spring Statement, Prime Minister’s Questions was a sideshow. Ed Davey asked the prime minister to promise to tax social media companies more, an entirely reasonable reaction from a Lib Dem who’s found out that Facebook paid Nick Clegg $100 million.
The hors d’oeuvres cleared away, Reeves got to her feet. She began a little shakily, delivering her opening lines through a fixed grin that was the opposite of reassuring. There was the Denunciation of The Truss, a ritual invocation that is supposed to ward off evil spirits and is now as much a part of Treasury tradition as battered red cases and whisky in the Chancellor’s glass.
Behind her, Labour MPs seemed listless. The announcement of increased defence spending, paid for by cuts to international aid, was heard in almost total silence, no one knowing whether to cheer or boo.
Reeves revealed that the growth forecast for his year had been halved since the autumn
To be fair to them, for a lot of the statement there was little to cheer about. Early on she’d mentioned growth, and a Tory had shouted “Where is it?” Keir Starmer stared at the Conservative benches, his expression that of a headmaster looking at a sixth form who have let themselves — and the school — very badly down.
But this was very much the question. Reeves revealed that the growth forecast for his year had been halved since the autumn. “I am not satisfied with these numbers,” she declared, speaking briefly for the nation, before launching into a long explanation of how the government’s planning proposals had got the Office for Budget Responsibility very excited indeed. This would end up in an announcement, to half-hearted cheers, that the OBR forecasts for more distant years are absolutely tremendous.
The restraint of Labour MPs was probably mainly because they know how difficult the welfare cuts will be for some of their constituents. But they may also know that the forecasts are all imaginary. It is as though the owner of Leicester City had announced to cheers that, thanks to the latest transfer season, the team was now forecast to win the Champions League in 2028 and 2029, once the small matter of this season’s relegation was out of the way.
For one thing, these forecasts could be blown out of the water at any moment by what Reeves coyly referred to as “global uncertainty”. Can we be a bit more specific about that global uncertainty? Is the global uncertainty in the Oval Office right now?
But even leaving aside the question of whether the Global Uncertainty wakes up and decidesto impose tariffs on the UK in retaliation for something that the Vice Global Uncertainty has misunderstood from one of his chat groups, forecasters can’t predict the future. Instead, they build economic models that they hope describe the world. In their efforts to be the opposite of Liz Truss, who declared these models to be worthless, the government has decided that they’re worth everything.
The result is that ministers now try to feed numbers into the OBR process that will get the best numbers out. In the Autumn it was farmers who found their lives were being turned upside down, not because anyone thought it was a good idea, but in order to make a Treasury line item add up. This time it is the disabled. There are plenty of people who will explain that one or other of these groups has sponged off the state for too long, but that isn’t really the point. Policy isn’t being made on merit. It has become a prisoner of the models. It may yet be that the most surprising movement of this parliament turns out to be The Labour Campaign To Rehabilitate Liz Truss.
The man whose job it was to make this case, or any kind of case, was shadow chancellor Mel Stride, who has so far had so little impact in the role that he’d be a great pub quiz tiebreaker. Denied advance sight of Reeves’s words, he had to do it more or less off-the-cuff. He’d brought along pages of speech notes, handwritten in thick black pen, sometimes in long paragraphs, sometimes a few words in large block capitals, and in some places what looked, from high up behind him, like scrawled formulae. They were covered in different-coloured highlights: green, orange, red and blue. Usually when MPs hold bundles of paper like that, they’ve come from a constituent who believes aliens are communicating with them through the toaster. Or, these days, from the US Secretary of Defense.
He was hampered by the fact that it’s really still a bit soon for the Conservatives to be complaining that the country is a mess. “Reeling from one fiscal event to the next is not a way to run the public finances,” he declared, to a warm laugh of agreement from Labour MPs who could remember 2022. He complained that the welfare cuts were “likely to harm many vulnerable people”, but also that they didn’t go far enough. There is a way in which those two thoughts would be consistent, but it’s probably not what Stride intends.
Replying to him, Reeves finally moved her own side to cheers. “The only plan for change they’re working on,” she said of the Conservatives, “is to change their party leader.” Robert Jenrick’s face was immobile. He has hopes of creating a new set of pub quiz rounds before the next election.
